One Planet Mobility

A work in the field of sustainable design to help Malmö city people to envision future scenarios with reduced personal mobility (student project)

Brief & context: This project was developed together with the One Planet Mobility (OPM) Initiative by WWF and coordinated by François Jégou. The OPM project seeks to reduce the personal mobility in developed countries to reduce our ecological footprint.
Our task was generating future scenarios to be used as a starting point in a creative workshops with politicians, arquitects and companies related with the planing and transportation in the city of Malmö.

More about "One Planet Mobility"

The purpose of One Planet Mobility is to work with five European cities – Barcelona, Lille, Freiburg, Malmö and Sofia – to develop a vision for sustainable urban mobility and explore ways to achieve that vision by 2030.
One Planet Mobility/Malmö is a cooperation between K3, WWF Sweden and the One Planet Mobility – European Cities Project, Strategic Design Scenarios, MEDEA Living Labs and the Traffic Environment division of the City of Malmö.
The five cities involved in OPM commit to reduce the cities' carbon emissions from personal mobility are by more than 20 % and follow a carbon reduction trajectory for personal mobility compatible with an overall 90 - 95 % GHG reduction target by 2050 in the EU.
More information:OPM at sustainable-everyday.net OPM at WWF

Process
The firsts two weeks of this project were used for ethographic studies. We focused on a particular person and we interviewed her, gave her cultural probes and follow her during the trips from the house to the office.

We compiled that information in a graphical way and attended to a workshop with Jégou and the other teams where we began with the creation stage.

Proposed context 1: The Bike city

40% of the trips inside Malmö are done by bike, so the city already has a huge bike culture. The city expect to receive around 100000 new inhabitants in the next years. This scenario aims to enhance the internal and external perception of Malmö as a city of bikes and engage all of their citizens, specially the new ones, in this bike culture. To achieve this goals we focused on services that are not currently provided and can have a positive impact on bike culture.

The core of this solution is a network of public venues for bike services. In those places the 2nd hand bike trade will be brought together. Without any cost for the user this will become the main point for buying new bikes removing the problems of finding buyers/sellers for people leaving/coming to the city and with "official" cheap prices the risk (and motivation) for buying stolen bikes will be removed. Furthermore, the tourists could book in advance bikes for their stay in the city using the bike stock in these bike venues.

In those places Malmö inhabitants could go to fix their bike on their own, rent the tools, get help or get the tools to fix the bike at home with the help of didactic videos.
Those videos will be available in a Youtube channel, in this way they can work as a marketing tool to help to transform Malmö in a city internationally well known for its bike culture.

On the other hand, designing for future scenarios implies solutions for citizens needs in the emerging contexts. So, what the population would need in a city without cars?
Leaving apart the daily job trip, the shopping trips are one of the main motivations for car use. We designed a bike-bound shopping carts to do the shopping easier inside of the big shopping malls. In addition we designed a subscription based service to allow frequently customers to get those shopping carts from the supermarkets with special prices.

Proposed context 2: A City in a Train
Being useful as an inspiration for a workshop were the main goal of these scenarios.
So, we decided to show a challenging idea, something beyond what can be seen as "reasonable". During our ethnographic research we found about the different emotions that private transport and public transport represents. People is keen on forgive things to the private car (traffic jams, mechanical problems, price) more than to public transport. Power, independence, individualism, identity, freedom, are emotions connected with cars not with public transport.

We wanted to challenge this by adding new values to the regional trains. Trains don't have to be a commodity, a standard service that citizens use but nobody specially enjoys. What if every carriage would be different? what if you can have a library wagon? what about doing small shoppings in the train? Or even more, what if you could spend the 30 minutes on the way home in a gym?